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War for talent networks continues

Gordon Zeilstra of Success Factors talks to HCTV about the importance of choosing the right recruitment platform to help wage the war for talent.

Video transcript below:

Gordon Zeilstra, VP Product Sales & Strategy, Asia-Pacific, Success Factors, SAP
Gordon Zeilstra: I think really when it comes to recruiting, not a whole lot has really changed in the way that we recruit or rather you know the challenge that recruiters face. We still have this real demand for sourcing candidates and finding the best and brightest and the war for talent is even stronger than it has been.

I think that the shift that’s happening though is, it’s not just a war for talent, but it’s in fact a war for a talent network. So I am not just interested in filling one particular seat, but really I want to know all of the different types of people that you liaise with, that you would like to work with, where great skill sets are found.

Reporter: Recruitment is a battle fought on many platforms and in many different ways, as Gordon Zeilstra of SAP explains.

Gordon Zeilstra: It allows us to think about how we recruit in terms of really going after what might be broadly thought about as the passive market. But really what it is, is it’s graduates who may not be graduating right now, but may be coming out of school in six months or a year from now. And so we want to start getting to know who they are.

The other categories of people are people who are not necessarily looking, but they need to be asked, they need to be asked. So we, so recruiters have to find creative ways to reach out to those folks and identify them and start a conversation.

And then the last category of people are the people that need to have a relationship. And so these are the people where we are going to want to utilise things like employer referral programs or going to want to utilise relationships that we have with other connectors that can identify that talent and bring them in as well.

So the tools that are helping us do that have really changed and we are seeing a lot of new tools that are being added to the market, a lot of creative technology that helps recruiters do their job as well.

Reporter: Zeilstra says it’s all about HR changing its mindset in line with changes in the recruitment sphere.

Gordon Zeilstra: In the olden days we used to just take a job that we have a need for, so somebody leaves the organisation and we create this job posting and we post it out you know to the web, through maybe some job boards or social networks and we’d wait and we’d wait for people to come in and apply for those types of jobs.

I think that what will need to happen is we are sort of going to need to change around that pyramid of you know now we actually ask for a 100 people to apply for a job, so we can screen it down to 10 and then those 10 can come in for interviews and then we find the appropriate candidate.

But if we think about it as inverting that sort of funnel and start thinking about it in terms of, if I need to hire 4 or 5 engineers or if I need to hire some accountants, I really want to utilise my hiring manager and I want to utilise other resources or key people that we have in our organisation or outside of our organisation to really build the talent community of identified people, where we can start this conversation, we can build trust, we can start a conversation and hopefully get to a point where we can talk mutually about our benefits and needs to have somebody join an organisation. So I think the talent community is something that we will see a lot of change and evolution around Australian employers.

Reporter: Zeilstra stresses it’s a case of picking a platform that will adapt with you and changes in the industry in the future.

Gordon Zeilstra: We have to keep, you know reminding ourselves perhaps that you know this isn’t just about a point technology solution that’s going to help us solve the strategic problems that we have to deal with and so that platform will become key, but the extensible nature of that platform where we can plug in other vendors or solutions or ideas, especially as things emerge or great new technologies come out or innovations come out is also going to be something that we want to be mindful of as well.

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A sell-out crowd of HR and IT professionals gathered in Sydney in September for the inaugural HR Tech Summit. With panel discussions, case studies, TED-style Tech Talks and solutions from service providers on display, delegates gained insights into the latest developments in this rapidly changing field from the industry’s most innovative practitioners.